Chronic Knee Pain

Amazingly, more women visit an orthopedic surgeon for knee pain than hip pain. This common condition is entirely related to pelvic organ prolapse, urinary incontinence, and chronic hip pain.

What medicine doesn’t acknowledge is that the human body is an interdependent system of mind-boggling complexity.  The “fix-it” mentality of orthopedics has little concern for the long-term implications of their so-called repairs.  After all, pain in other joints resulting from say, hip replacement, is just another opportunity to do more surgery. 

It is a patent truth that the “healthcare system” knows virtually nothing about health. 

In all fairness, we humans have historically had no practical interest in health and when a medical problem occurs, we have trained our doctors to simply “fix” the problem and not suggest that changes in diet, exercise or lifestyle might create better health for the patient. 

My point is this, chronic knee pain is not a fluke.  It is the result of skeletal mis-alignment in the pelvis and lumbar spine that impacts the entire skeletal system as well as surrounding soft tissues, hips, knees, ankles, lower, and upper back. 

And the surgeries, as is so often the case, are likely to cause far more long-term problems than solutions.

Knee replacement surgery involves attaching a prosthetic joint to the femur or thigh bone.  What women are rarely told is that with the prosthesis taking over the gravitational load, the thigh bone may shrink and atrophy, loosening the prosthesis and likely requiring additional surgery. 

Natural gait is also disrupted by the surgery, which is likely to result in other joint issues in the ankles, hips, and other knee.

Virtually everyone is raised with the expectation that if something goes wrong physically, the doctors will know what is wrong and what to do about it.  The result has been that we are given only the most cursory anatomical information in our education system,  so our ignorance reinforces our dependence on the medical system.

If the medical system truly had our best interests at heart, that would be great.  However, while the system works miracles with acute care and trauma, the treatment of chronic conditions is controlled by the drug and surgical supply companies, whose sole interest is maximizing profitability, and the suffering they create for women is not even on their radar. 

The appropriate response to this unfortunate situation is self-care.  Self-care means educating ourselves about our conditions, no longer assuming that the medical system has all (or even any) of the answers, and searching out legitimate alternatives. 

While alternatives exist for virtually every condition, some are clearly beyond the fringe.  Increasingly, however, science-based information is becoming available to women struggling with various conditions, which is not driven or shaped by the interests of the drug/surgical supply companies. 

Self-care means taking ownership of your health back from the medical system.  It means educating yourself about the true root causes of your condition and understanding anatomically what is going on.  It means running experiments, listening to your body, and letting your body teach you about what it needs.

We all live busy lives. In the face of chronic and often debilitating pain that seriously impacts our quality of life, we have a choice.  We either turn ourselves over to the medical system with the predictable risks, or we make room in our lives for the education and experimentation we need to understand how to heal ourselves.

At Whole Woman we are committed to offering the most reliable, science-based methods for successfully stabilizing and reversing chronic conditions common in women.  Chronic knee pain is one of those conditions.